Q. Your fine products have been my indispensable companions since childhood. Prompted by Katrina news, I got out my Collegiate Dictionary to find why the New Orleans paper might have taken the name “Picayune.”  The answer was right there, of course, in the noun definitions.  I was surprised to find, however, that the adjective entries seemed to make no allusion to what I thought was a common sense of the word: fussy, finicky, nitpicking, hairsplitting, etc.  Is my diction faulty, or could something be missing from your treatment of this word?

A. The senses of picayune to which you refer are covered in the Collegiate Dictionary by the synonymous cross-references "PETTY; SMALL-MINDED" that are included after the sense divider "also."

Petty is defined in the Collegiate Dictionary as "marked by or reflective of narrow interests and sympathies," while small-minded means "having narrow interests, sympathies, or outlook."

A survey of usage indicates that adjectival usage of picayune leans less toward finickiness or fussiness, which usually suggests a high or extreme degree of particularity in matters of taste, and more toward a pettiness that suggests particularity for the purpose of argument, hair-splitting, self-interest, etc. As an example, you might describe a person who puts much care into his dress as "fussy," while a person who points out an incorrect detail in someone's speech, even if it bears no relevance to the argument it contains, might be said to be "picayune."

Q. I listened to your online dictionary's pronunciation of oyez, a word used to call a court to order, especially the Supreme Court of the United States. You have definitely the wrong pronunciation for a French word. It is not \oh-yes\ but more like \oh-yeah\. Almost as bad as a misspellin', don't ya think?

A. The pronunciation given for oyez is correct.  This is not a French word. If you read the etymology for the entry, you see that the word has its roots in Middle English and Anglo-French, and is not a borrowing from Modern French.  Indeed there is no such word oyez in Modern French.  The closest equivalent in Modern French would be the verb "ouïr", which is rarely used and does not even have an imperative form.  Thus, how such a putative word oyez would be pronounced in Modern French is irrelevant.  The pronunciation \oh-yes\ is actually very traditional and is likely very similar to the Middle English and Anglo-French pronunciation that has been used since at least the 15th century.

Q. If I say "The bell startled her" as a trope for "The clang of the bell startled her," is the trope a metonymy or a synecdoche?  Can you give me other examples of these figures of speech?

A. In simple terms, synecdoche refers to the use of a part to represent the whole, the whole to represent a part, or the use of a term to represent something that is more or less specific (as creature for "human" or human for "creature"). A classic example is the use of the term hands to mean "workers" (as in "all hands on deck"), or the noun sails to mean "ships."

Metonymy refers to the use of the name of one thing to represent something related to it, such as crown to represent "king" or White House to represent "President." Another example is a phrase like "We are reading Shakespeare in class," in which "Shakespeare" is used to refer not to the person, but to the works he wrote.

The question of whether using bell to mean "the clang of the bell" is synecdoche or metonymy depends on whether the sound a bell makes should be considered one of its parts. Since a bell's clang is more likely to be considered something associated with a bell, rather than a part of it, the phrase would qualify as an example of metonymy.